


Titanium

by Taste_of_Suburbia



Category: Original Work
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Family, Friendship, Gen, Guilt, Hurt/Comfort, Protectiveness, Referenced Killer Robots, Referenced murder, Robots, Science Fiction, h/c_bingo, tragic past
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-07
Updated: 2016-06-07
Packaged: 2018-07-12 19:21:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7119274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taste_of_Suburbia/pseuds/Taste_of_Suburbia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A9 is Sigma's guardian angel, just not of the heavenly type.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Titanium

**Author's Note:**

> I always forget that you can use original work stuff for h/c_bingo; this is a fill for amnesty for the prompt ‘robots/androids.’

 

The ancient phone caked with dust and crammed on her bookshelf rang incessantly.

Sigma crossed her arms and considered breaking the phone as she contemplated whether to first wash the leaning tower of dishes or scrub the wood floors until she could see her own reflection again. She’d never quite gotten behind the whole concept of taking pride in one’s home, or apartment rather. The most she can do was make her bed in the mornings, and some days she couldn’t even bring herself to do that. A typical day for her was tinkering with the mish-mash of trinkets laid out on her work desk for a good six hours or so before remembering to pop in a frozen dinner thingy… then back to work.

Life was bittersweet alone. Still, it couldn’t be anything but when you were surrounded by dust-covered better forgotten memories and inanimate objects with better days that were best left untouched.

The phone didn’t quit, bringing nothing forth but a barrage of memories of demands by the world around her and conversations with her exes. Sigma tried to make a habit of answering the phone, since it was half the way she got business and the rest walk-ins for the courageous and foolishly desperate, but habits died oh so easy and with minimal fuss.

The gizmos on her desk she picked at with a screwdriver were a much-welcomed respite from the relatively high-tech world she grew up into. If you could call malfunctioning, amateur looking robots high-tech. Robots bred to kill, robots bred to think _and_ kill: a deadly combination.

And the rest of the high-tech greedy world wondered why she’d settled comfortably in her new life of child’s play. If they wanted results or promise then they should have made her father an offer sooner, before he was brought down mercilessly by one of his own creations. Except robots didn’t have mercy anyway, they didn’t possess empathy or forgiveness, didn’t understand pain or malfunction and that’s why neither stopped them. That’s what made the thinking so much worse. You couldn’t make decisions without empathy, at least in Sigma’s world, at least not _rational_ decisions.

So Sigma had stepped away and she was still shunning that world, for her own sanity.

Except that didn’t stop her from going into the basement every night and opening the closet. Her father’s most prized robot laid upright there, unplugged, one arm partially outstretched and palm facing up, as if he were reaching for Sigma even if unable to reach the world.

The fear of going back didn’t stop her from jolting awake from nightmares, fingers grasping in the dark until consciousness sank its claws into her. Her fingers ever-reaching as if they’d slide into a cold, metal hand. The only touch she remembered so vividly.

It didn’t stop her from reaching for the cables wondering just when she would break. Thick, clunky cables so unlike his thin, quivering fingers grasping her own frail, all too breakable human ones, wanting to protect her when she was only six years old. Wanting to protect her from the one who looked near identical to him, the one who murdered her father.

And what had she done? She’d locked him in a closet and unplugged him, and he had let her without lunging at her, despite giving him ample time to. The blank look in his eyes had betrayed no hurt, _he_ hadn’t been capable of that. Robots couldn’t feel, if they could they might be even more dangerous. That look though, as blank as it was it had been sharp enough to cut, and the wound was still there after seventeen years.

If Sigma plugged him back in he could kill her. Would she be strong enough to eject him from the world she before had so confidently taken him out of?

So A9 waited, rotting, and who knew if robots dreamed and what they dreamed of if they did. 

A9 had _once_ been hers. She had no claim to him anymore. After his first failed C-series, her father had designed a robot specifically for Sigma, to supposedly watch out for her always. A9, technically the tenth of his series, was programed to protect her at all costs, given her mother’s recent death and that her father’s work granted him many enemies. Sigma had eaten up A9’s work-up when she was six, having been with him for less than a year before further tragedy struck. Yet despite the devouring of his schematics she couldn’t fully grasp his essence, or the true depth of his purpose. She had asked her father about it and he had cupped her hand in his two large ones, winking at her, and he had never spoken of it and she had never asked again. She would have the whole rest of her life to figure him out.

So was what she did a betrayal of her father? What she was _still_ doing? Throwing his own failure right back in his face? Why should she follow in her daddy’s footsteps, why should she trust the one she had named Dorian so long ago?

Her father had chided her when she called them robots, and would no doubt glower at her for calling them low-tech pieces of crap now. He had called them Guardian Angels. The A, B and C series’, all dismantled and dissolved in vats of acid. Except A9. She had spared him, and for what reason than to bring him back someday?

A9 was Sigma’s own guardian angel, just not of the heavenly type.

The phone continued to ring. The only place she could find silence was the basement.

She was so sure she was dreaming when her chewed-down fingernails scraped against the thickest cable, finding the miraculously unclogged port without much thought. She had grown up knowing everything there was to know about her father’s life work. She knew how to build them, how to reprogram them, how to tear them down, how to store them away safely until further use.

Sigma was well-aware of consequences too.

The dream she suspected because she could _not_ be doing this molded into something too recognizable. That night all those years ago, that night where her fingers had scrabbled at the shiny new cables, ripping them out of limbs that reminded her too much of human ones despite being devoid of flesh, ripping and yanking and tearing until her fingers bled and her furiously thumping heart threatened to leap out of her chest and into his own shattered one.

Shattered just before he permanently deprogrammed B11 by ripping out the wires that sustained him, that fed him whatever had led him to take her father out of this world, to rip him out of her already half-childhood, half-sanity, half-life.

Sigma had never anticipated being alone. But she had had this dream before.

A hand grasped her throat before she remembered to breathe and A9 pulled himself out of the closet. The look he gave her was as blank as she remembered it, too cold to be a dream, but the spark of returning consciousness was like a flame, and with it came the release.

She stumbled back and coughed, hand rubbing her exposed throat gently. His hand reached for her own this time, not her sure to be bruised throat, and he pulled her closer as if he needed some semblance of comfort, as if he even knew what comfort was. Yet this was something Sigma had suspected for too long, feared, knew she could never understand. Robots couldn’t feel, couldn’t desire, but what if her father had designed A9 to do just this? How could A9 protect her if he didn’t know _why_ he had to protect her, if he couldn’t form the pain required to lash out against those who would hurt her? To form a connection she couldn’t bear thinking about.

Maybe that was why she had locked him up all those years. Maybe she was more afraid of what she would do with that knowledge than merely fueled by the fear of him. 

The hand tightened. When Sigma was such a little girl her father would tell her that she was the caregiver, just as her mother was, that her instincts were to comfort and heal and provide. Yet selfishness had curled itself tight in her chest all these years, unwilling to release her or A9.

The selfishness was still there, though a floodgate withered and the urge to comfort came back to her as a long-forgotten friend.

“It’s okay. I’m sorry.” She didn’t even have to work for it; the words came more naturally than any had before. She hoped it could be seen, yet felt guilt for even her petty, unreasonable fear. 

“With apology comes the desire for forgiveness?” A9 paused for a long minute. The door was only four steps behind, give or take one, but he wouldn’t hurt her, would he? “Or the knowledge that forgiveness will not be given.”

She nodded. Hundreds of hours with her father down in his workshop, learning about humans, learning about _her._ The last link to her father.

Sigma could lock him back up. She didn’t have to do this, didn’t have to _live_ this.

She brushed out his empty ports carefully, clearing them of cobwebs, always feeling his intense gaze on her. She imagined once that she had seen a softer gaze, one too human, yet a robot with numerous variables had fed partly to her decade and a half’s worth of fear. The ministrations gave her precious seconds to collect herself, to focus on something else, but hiding was no better than running. God, he wasn’t even human and yet… he was the most open-minded yet broken thing that Sigma had ever seen. And he remembered her. Sure, he had been programed to protect her, but she wasn’t sure if too much time spent unplugged would cause fissures, fragments of uncertainty. If there had been more time spent down here, would he have forgotten her?  

How the hell could she ever drop him in a vat of acid?

“You called me something once. Your father begged you not to grow too attached. It was I who was meant to grow attached to you.”

Sigma swallowed. There was no way to ease herself back into this, not when A9 didn’t know the effect his words had. “Dorian,” she reminded. The cold metal of his hand was more familiar and reassuring to her than a warm, human one could ever prove itself to be. This was why she couldn’t connect to people, because she hated _them_ so much, her father’s creations, but she loved them so much too. They were pieces of her, they inhabited every memory, reminded her of her father’s endless obsession, the one she had once so looked up to.

She half wanted to pound her fists into Dorian and half wanted him to hug her so hard that he would tear her apart in the process.

“Yes. Dorian. You have grown. You look so much like your mother.” She sobbed, letting go of his hand and curling in on herself. He watched her. He was capable of hurt, Sigma didn’t shelter doubts of that, but he would never hurt her. There wasn’t anything about him right now that suggested that. Words though… words were different. She looked more like her father than her mother; she wondered if that meant anything. “Your father would not have wanted me to say that.”

“I’m not that girl anymore.” A lie? She wasn’t sure of that either. If she was even thinking about putting him back in that closet then she was that same girl, that same fearful, spiteful girl that refused to hold onto anything.

His titanium finger brushed a tear rolling down her cheek. She wasn’t used to people touching her, not anymore, but she didn’t jump. She didn’t fear. She didn’t run. When he reached for her she didn’t push him back into the dark and the cold and the gloom.

And she remembered this time to take a breath and allow it to fill every aching, neglected crevice of her that had been shielded from the light for so long.

**FIN**


End file.
